Oscars 2010: Sandra Bullock's Oscar acceptance speech

Sandra Bullock's tears during her acceptance speech were endearing rather than
irritatingly self-indulgent.

By Marc Lee

2:58PM GMT 08 Mar 2010

Sandra Bullock played the greatest weekend of her career brilliantly, first by turning up at the Razzies on Saturday night to accept the award for Worst Actress (for her role as a crossword-compiler-turned-stalker in All About Steve), then by delivering a delightfully batty acceptance speech at the Oscars where she won Best Actress for The Blind Side, in which she plays a mom who turns a disadvantaged teenager into a football star.

“Did I really earn this, or did I just wear you all down?” she asked her peers at the Academy Awards, before declaring her love for the other nominees in her category: Gabourey Sidibe (“exquisite… beyond words”), Carey Mulligan (“your grace, elegance, beauty and talent make me sick”), Helen Mirren (“I feel like we are family”) and Meryl Streep (“such a good kisser”).

She then thanked everyone who had shown her kindness “when it wasn’t fashionable” and to “everyone who was mean to me”, including George Clooney, who, she alleged, once threw her into a pool.

It was all very charming and good-humoured, and somehow when the tears started to flow as she thanked her mother “for not letting me ride in cars with boys until I was 18”, it was endearing rather than irritatingly self-indulgent.

Certainly, it was not in the same league as Gwyneth Paltrow’s infamous moment of emotional incontinence at the 1999 Oscars. From the second that Jack Nicholson announced her best-actress victory for Shakespeare in Love, she was blubbing.

The waterworks persisted as she ran through her list of benefactors, including her agent (“a beautiful man and a wonderful agent, and, in his case, that is not an oxymoron”), before completely losing it when she thanked her mother for all the love that had been bestowed on her.

It was a memorable performance for all the wrong reasons, something that Paltrow gamely acknowledged the following year when, announcing Kevin Spacey’s best-actor award for American Beauty, she admitted: “You probably remember how wimpy I was.”

Other entertaining outbursts on Oscar night include the one by an over-excited Roberto Benigni, who won Best Actor in 1999 for Life is Beautiful, and who informed the audience, “My body is in tumult”, adding : “I would like to make love to everybody.”

Then there was Sally Field (1985 Best Actress for Places in the Heart) who insisted: “You like me, right now, you like me!”; Cuba Gooding Jr (1997 Best Supporting Actor for Jerry Maguire) who delared: “Everybody I love you. I love you all!”; and director James Cameron who boasted in 1998: “I’m king of the world” when he won for Titanic.

But perhaps the most ill-judged speech came from documentary-maker Michael Moore, (2003 Best Documentary for Bowling For Columbine), whose attack on the President – “Shame on you, Mr Bush, shame on you” – was roundly booed.